# Weakly-supervised Automated Audio Captioning via text only training

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.12242 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12242/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 31 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Decoupled Weight Decay Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05101/) (2017)
- [Microsoft COCO Captions: Data Collection and Evaluation Server](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00325/) (2015)
- [SPICE: Semantic Propositional Image Caption Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.08822/) (2016)
- [Large-scale Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining with Feature Fusion and Keyword-to-Caption Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06687/) (2022)
- [PANNs: Large-Scale Pretrained Audio Neural Networks for Audio Pattern Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.10211/) (2019)
- [Mind the Gap: Understanding the Modality Gap in Multi-modal Contrastive Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02053/) (2022)
- [Clotho: An Audio Captioning Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09387/) (2019)
- [AudioCLIP: Extending CLIP to Image, Text and Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13043/) (2021)
- [WavCaps: A ChatGPT-Assisted Weakly-Labelled Audio Captioning Dataset for Audio-Language Multimodal Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17395/) (2023)
- [Text-Only Training for Image Captioning using Noise-Injected CLIP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00575/) (2022)
- [DeCap: Decoding CLIP Latents for Zero-Shot Captioning via Text-Only Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03032/) (2023)
- [Audio Captioning Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.09817/) (2021)
- [Prefix tuning for automated audio captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17489/) (2023)
- [Investigating Local and Global Information for Automated Audio Captioning with Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11457/) (2021)
- [COALA: Co-Aligned Autoencoders for Learning Semantically Enriched Audio Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08386/) (2020)
- [Automated Audio Captioning using Transfer Learning and Reconstruction Latent Space Similarity Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.04692/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for AI-Generated Content: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19473/) (2024)
- [DRCap: Decoding CLAP Latents with Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Zero-shot Audio Captioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09472/) (2024)
- [SLAM-LLM: A Modular, Open-Source Multimodal Large Language Model Framework and Best Practice for Speech, Language, Audio and Music Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09385/) (2026)
- [AlignCap: Aligning Speech Emotion Captioning to Human Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.19134/) (2024)
- [Diffusion-Link: Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Bridging the Audio-Text Modality Gap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11330/) (2025)
- [Domain Adaptation Method and Modality Gap Impact in Audio-Text Models for Prototypical Sound Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.04376/) (2025)
- [Classifier-Guided Captioning Across Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03183/) (2025)
- [COMET: Concept Space Dissection of the Modality Gap in Audio-Text Multimodal Contrastive Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29628/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In recent years, datasets of paired audio and captions have enabled remarkable success in automatically generating descriptions for audio clips, namely Automated Audio Captioning (AAC). However, it is labor-intensive and time-consuming to collect a sufficient number of paired audio and captions. Motivated by the recent advances in Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP), we propose a weakly-supervised approach to train an AAC model assuming only text data and a pre-trained CLAP model, alleviating the need for paired target data. Our approach leverages the similarity between audio and text embeddings in CLAP. During training, we learn to reconstruct the text from the CLAP text embedding, and during inference, we decode using the audio embeddings. To mitigate the modality gap between the audio and text embeddings we employ strategies to bridge the gap during training and inference stages. We evaluate our proposed method on Clotho and AudioCaps datasets demonstrating its ability to achieve a relative performance of up to ~83% compared to fully supervised approaches trained with paired target data.